


Fragments

by AwkwardAnnie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221b format, Fluff, Gen, IBISH in-universe, Introspection, Jim is a mathematician, John Plays The Clarinet, M/M, Otters, Post-Reichenbach, dark themes, sherlock is an oxford man, the boat race
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-27
Updated: 2012-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-31 20:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwkwardAnnie/pseuds/AwkwardAnnie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of largely unrelated 221B-style drabbles. Various pairings and themes, tags will be updated as and when necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Silence

It was the silence that was the worst, John decided at the end of the second week. He’d got used to the constant noise – the shouting at the TV, the gunshots, the midnight violin concertos, the exploding chemicals and Mrs Hudson in the middle looking outraged and fondly amused all at once. The absence of sound was sudden and crushing.

At first he’d tried to fight it. He turned the TV up, opened the windows and let the street pour in, but it was still too quiet. He slammed doors and rattled tea-cups and the silence persisted, deafening in its emptiness. He went through seven different ringtones trying to find one that didn’t hurt; in the end, he set it to silent.

By the third week, he’d started talking to himself. It started with the skull and silly things like, “How was your day?” and “Nice weather we’re having,” and “Did you see Big Brother last night?” – idle natter to fill the huge gaping space in the world. Then the conversations got longer and more involved. He debated the existence of an afterlife with the toaster and had shouting matches with the computer for misbehaving. But the silence grew and grew and soon there weren’t any more words left to be said.

At night, all he heard was his own breathing.


	2. Waterfall

The first week, John dreams of the waterfall.

Every night it’s the same dream, playing over and over like a film reel in his head. It begins with him on the edge of a cliff, with an unfamiliar landscape spread out below him like an oil painting. The air smells of grass and ozone and shakes with the sound of the water crashing down onto the rocks below. On a plateau rising out of the seething waters, a figure in a dark coat spreads its arms as if to fly. John wants to reach out but he can’t move, so he stands and watches as the figure falls with one hand outstretched to him, begging. He can’t move so he screams instead, as loud as he can, but however loud he screams the roar of the water is always louder, growing in a crescendo until his very bones vibrate. The first five nights, he wakes up as the falling figure hits the water, still screaming. 

On the sixth night, he doesn’t wake. He watches the waters close back up, like a wound healing over. He doesn’t have any strength left in him to scream.

On the seventh night, he watches the figure plummet towards the water, hand still reaching out.

He leaps. For just an instant, he soars like a bird.


	3. Intruder

“My flat is cold,” Jim announced the first time he appeared in Sebastian’s room in the middle of the night and insinuated himself into his bed. “I’m sleeping here tonight.”

In hindsight, Sebastian should have complained more, but the LCD display of his alarm clock read 2:34AM, he’d gone to bed well after midnight, and there was something in the way Jim said it that strongly suggested that if Sebastian had a problem with the arrangement he would quite shortly find himself sans skin. In an attempt to preserve both his dignity and his hide, he turned over so his back was to Jim and slurred out something like, “Whatev’, boss, sofa’s in th’ other room.”

He heard Jim’s hum of approval and the soft rustle of fabric. What he was not expecting was for Jim to pull back the duvet and slither in. He was definitely not expecting Jim to wrap an arm and a leg around him and squeeze like a vice.

“Much better,” Jim breathed in his ear, and his tone dared Sebastian to defy him, but Sebastian wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Instead, he spent the rest of the night dozing in fits and starts and dreamed of tigers being crushed by boa constrictors. 

To his complete and lingering disgust, Jim slept like a baby.


	4. Worth the Wound

Even I was impressed by how fast Jim’s latest target moved, pulling the revolver out of his jacket and squeezing the trigger twice in one motion. There was a burn like a hot poker, the second bullet grazing my ribcage and sending me tumbling to the floor, then a horrible crunch which sounded like Jim pistol-whipping the bastard with the butt of my rifle. Then he was kneeling next to me with someone else’s blood soaking into his designer shirt.

“Shit, Moran, you dead or what?”

It was almost worth the pain to see the look on his face. There was a fire in his eyes like nothing I’d ever seen before, and his lips curled back in a snarl. Not for the first time, there was the impression of something terrible behind those eyes, absolute insanity in a sharp suit. In all the time I’d spent working for him, I’d never been so glad I was on his side.

“I’ll live, boss. He’s a crap shot.”

Jim tugged up my shirt and peered at the wound. “Ooo, that’s gonna leave a mark.” Then the facade of sanity returned like the flick of a switch and he turned back to the poor sod with the pistol. “Now, someone needs to learn a lesson about not touching my toys. Shall we begin?”


	5. No More Cry

He didn’t cry outside the hospital, as the paramedics wheeled the body away, because he couldn’t feel anything. He didn’t cry in the waiting room as Molly used words like _massive trauma_ and _instantaneous_ , but that was fine because Molly cried enough for both of them. They wouldn’t let him keep the coat.

He couldn’t cry at the funeral, because he had to stand up and say how Sherlock had always cared about the people he worked with, even though he hadn’t, and how he would be missed by everyone who knew him, even though he wouldn’t. Not crying was just another white lie.

He wanted to cry at the grave, but though his voice broke and the mist filled his eyes, the tears wouldn’t come, so he squared his shoulders and marched away. _Next time_ , he told himself. _Next time._ The next time never came.

So he shouldn’t have cried three years later, when Sherlock Holmes stood in his dingy West Kensington flat saying _sorry_ over and over again. He shouldn’t have, but he did; three years of unshed tears running down his face and soaking into that same coat—threadbare with age—while Sherlock left finger marks on his shoulders and mumbled, _I’m so sorry, John, it’s okay, please don’t cry, John, it’s okay, I’m here, I’ve come back._


	6. Otters

“Did you know,” Sherlock mumbled indistinctly into John’s collar-bone. “Otters hold hands when they’re asleep, so they don’t drift apart in the night.”

“That’s nice,” said John after a brief moment of surprised silence. They’d finally cracked a particularly tricky case involving a dead university student and a stack of missing exam papers. After three days with no sleep and minimal food, Sherlock had devoured all his take-away curry and most of John’s and promptly expired on the sofa, where John had joined him with the foolish hope of watching Match Of The Day. Sherlock had been gradually slipping down, glacier-like, until his head had ended up on John’s shoulder, and it was from there that he made his sleepy proclamation. John was enduring the invasion of his personal space well, not least because it meant a rare moment of peace after a trying few days.

“Read it in a book,” Sherlock added, as if this would help. John just made a vaguely interested noise.

Two goals and a blatant penalty later, John looked down to find that he was being presented with Sherlock’s hand, held palm-up. He stared at it blankly at it for a few seconds.

“Don’t want you to drift,” murmured Sherlock softly.

John rolled his eyes, but took hold of Sherlock’s hand anyway. “Happy now?”

“Much better.”


	7. The Science of Rowing

“That-” said Sherlock, spitting venom with every word as he slammed the front door and stomped up the stairs. “-was the most shambolic, pathetic display I have ever had the misfortune to witness.”

“Well, it was certainly exciting.” John made an attempt at a placating tone as he hung up his coat and tried to rub some life back into his hands. Two hours on the bank of the Thames in an unusually sharp April wind watching the Oxford and Cambridge crews navigating rough waters, an incoming tide and trying to avoid decapitating anyone while listening to an terrifyingly animated Sherlock yelling things that would make football hooligans blanch was not exactly his idea of a fun afternoon.

Sherlock just huffed at this, tossing his scarf—dark blue, of course—on the floor and hurling himself onto the sofa like a sulking child. “Robbed,” he told a cushion acidly. “Umpire’s decision was wrong. Any idiot could see the stream was to blame. Should have klaxoned again.”

“I’ll just make tea, shall I?” John had the distinct feeling of being dismissed, especially as Sherlock was now muttering something about finding ‘that imbecile’ and giving him ‘something to _really_ protest about’. So he put the kettle on and opened a new blog post.

_Saturday 7th April 2012_

_Sherlock Holmes confirmed for closet boatie._


	8. Belief

It was four days after the Incident when John, walking back from the supermarket, turned a corner and froze in shock.

 _I believe in Sherlock Holmes_ , said the graffiti that hadn’t been there the day before, in bright yellow spraypaint across the side of the grade II-listed building. John walked the rest of the way back to Baker Street in a daze.

The next time he passed, someone else had added _Moriarty was real_ underneath.

Within a week, the messages had spread across London, stencilled on post-boxes and scrawled on lampposts. On the Tube, a sticker that said _Watson’s Warriors_ made him smile for the first time since the Incident. At the end of the second week, his eyes met Sherlock’s, in the window of a coffee shop, over the words _I NEVER LIED_. He made it all the way back to the flat before crying.

In the third week, John was stopped in the street by a young woman whose t-shirt read _I’m fighting John Watson’s war,_ who squeezed his hand in both of hers and told him she was sorry for his loss. When she had disappeared  back into the crowd, John found he was holding a bracelet stamped _Believe in Sherlock._ He wore it tucked inside the cuff of his shirt for six months until the rubber broke.


	9. Frogs

The kettle landed in Sherlock’s lap with a thud.

“Clean it.”

“What?” Sherlock looked up at John with an expression of injured innocence.

“There were frogs’ legs in it. Clean it,” John repeated.

“That was an experiment! A vital piece of research!” Sherlock protested in a tone which suggested that John in his ignorance had deprived the entire scientific community of world-changing knowledge. “Besides, it won’t kill you,” he offered as though that made things better.

John was having none of it. “I don’t care. It’s making the water taste of frogs. I don’t want froggy tea, Sherlock. I put up with the eyeballs in the microwave and the... whatever the hell it was that you clogged the sink with last week, but I am not drinking anything that tastes of amphibians.”

“It’s perfectly sterile.” Sherlock rolled his eyes long-sufferingly, looking totally disinterested in John’s plight. “But if it will make you feel better, I will ensure that it is thoroughly defrogged.”

“Good. And while you’re at it, I’ve told you not to leave the hydrochloric acid in the fridge. It won’t go off.” Sherlock made a noise which John graciously chose to take as an affirmative.  “I’m making toast, you want some?”

“John,” Sherlock said as John turned away.

“What?”

“You may prefer not to look in the bread bin.”


	10. (In)famous

He heard about the movement in a café in Avignon, eavesdropping on a gaggle of tourists from Kent. He dismissed it as ridiculous—no-one could possibly care that much—and tried to remember not to order two coffees.

A week later he saw the graffiti in the centre of Manchester. He’d already taken a picture of it to show to John before he realised what he was doing. It felt wrong to delete the file, so he set it as his wallpaper instead.

He didn’t like the posters. It was strange seeing his own face on every street, like looking into a hundred mirrors, and now the whole country knew what he looked like.  Just to be on the safe side, he bleached his hair again.

In a library in York, someone had stuffed cards reading _John Watson is not alone_ into all the Colin Dexter novels. He tucked one into his wallet, behind his fifth fake ID, where it wouldn’t get creased. It seemed important at the time.

Six months after his ‘death’, disguised as a Russian tourist, he passed John on Oxford Street. There was a hardness in his friend’s eyes, and a black silicone band around his wrist.

That night, Sherlock Holmes sent a text. It had no greeting, no signature and only three words:

_Don’t stop believing._


	11. Bedroom Warfare

Sharing a bed with Sherlock Holmes, John mused, was in many respects a lot like invading Afghanistan.

First, there were the inherent problems of the terrain. Having never shared a bed with anyone in thirty years, Sherlock had developed a style of sleeping which mostly consisted of spreading himself over as wide an area as possible with an efficiency rivalled only by cats and pond algae.  He also snored. Loudly.

Second was the resistance force, which arrived in the form of cases. Sherlock’s phone would buzz in the middle of the night and instead of ignoring it until the morning, like a normal person, he would immediately get up to answer, dragging the duvet with him and leaving a half-awake John behind, cold and confused. A direct assault—just asking him not to get up—was completely ineffective. A more subtle approach, namely hiding all the phones in the house overnight, worked better... for exactly two nights, until Sherlock got wise.

But despite the complications, there were moments, like now, with the sun peeking in through the curtains and Sherlock’s arm draped languidly over his chest, when John thought that this whole silly mess might work out in the end—

“Stop thinking,” mumbled Sherlock into John’s neck. “I can feel you thinking.”

Or possibly it was time to start dropping bombs.


	12. Hen Party

It was an unassuming Tuesday morning when John came downstairs to find a hen on the dining table.

“Oh,” he said. Before he could do anything more intelligent, there was a swish of dressing-gown as Sherlock swept past him.

“I see you’ve met our visitor,” said Sherlock as he bustled about the kitchen. “John, this is Gertrude. Gertrude, my flatmate John.”

“Oh,” said John again, and then, before he could stop himself, “Hello, Gertrude.”

Gertrude regarded him with minimal interest, then went back to scratching idly at the surface of the table.

 “Sherlock,” John said slowly. “It’s a chicken.”

“Yes, well done, John.” Sherlock rolled his eyes. “He’s not normally this slow,” he told the hen in the manner of a parent apologising for a wayward child.

“Why is there a chicken on our table?”

“Gertrude is donating her feathers to the cause of science,” said Sherlock, sitting down in front of the microscope. “I’m investigating whether it’s possible to administer a fatal dose of poison in a sharpened quill before the casing dissolves.”

“Oh,” said John for the third time this morning, as he opened the fridge, looked at the eggs and closed it again. “I think I’ll just have tea.”

“He’s not normally that monosyllabic either,” Sherlock told Gertrude after John had left. “Do you think he’s getting broody?”


	13. Aggressive Topology

One day, Sebastian returned to Jim’s flat in Mayfair to find that the living room had been filled with maths.  Jim stood in front of a huge rolling whiteboard, one pen spinning idly in his fingers and another tucked behind each ear. The board was a hurricane of lines and symbols and diagrams that made Sebastian’s eyes cross. There were not very many numbers.

 “Er, afternoon, Boss,” he chanced and was immediately shushed. Jim muttered something about homotopy classes; he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working.

Aggravatingly, the whiteboard was between Sebastian and the kitchen, and the extra-strong coffee kept there. He wondered where Jim had found the damn thing, and how he managed to get it into the flat. Probably nicked it from a nearby school, knowing Jim. A brave attempt to circumnavigate it resulted in tripping over a pile of journals from the London Mathematical Society. On the positive side, from his new vantage point on the floor Sebastian could confirm that yes, that was a half-erased primary school history lesson on the back of the board.

“Do you think that the fundamental group is actually trivial?” asked Jim finally.

“Wouldn’t know, boss, I read Classics,” Sebastian replied as he picked himself up and went to find coffee leaving Jim to fret about loops and basepoints.


	14. Duet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the original 221b which spawned the rather longer work "Suite for Violin and Clarinet", included here for completeness.

The black case sat in the window of the charity shop. It was the third time John had walked past it that week, but the first time he’d stopped, hand on the glass. The price on the tag was about a tenth of the market value, even for a second-hand instrument, and it was for a good cause, after all. It even came with a bundle of sheet music.

Back in the flat, John was surprised at how much of the fingering he could remember, the notes like a second language. It took longer to sort out his breathing, but as he worked through the stack of scores the sounds came easier. He’d stopped in the middle of a piece to work out the fingering for a high C when it happened.

“Pachelbal’s _Canon in D_. I didn’t know you played the clarinet.”

John nearly swallowed the instrument in surprise. He hadn’t heard Sherlock come in, but there his friend was, leaning against the door frame. “Not since I was at school,” he managed eventually. Sherlock made a noise of interest.

“You’re not bad.”

“Er, thanks.”

He turned back to the piece, but Sherlock was suddenly right next to him, tucking his violin under his chin.

“I’ll take the top,” he said, picking up his bow. “And you take the bottom.”


End file.
